Call for proposals

“Universal Classification in the 21st Century”

SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop

Saturday, November 1, 2014

ASIST Annual Meeting

Seattle, WA

ASIST’s Special Interest Group in Classification Research will hold its annual Classification Research Workshop as part of the ASIST Annual Meeting in Seattle, Washington, on November 1, 2014. The Workshop Program Committee is currently inviting proposals for papers to be presented at the workshop.

DUE DATES:

Proposals are due on Friday, August 15. Please submit your proposal in PDF or RTF format to Jonathan Furner at furner@gseis.ucla.edu

Notice of acceptance will be sent before the Earlybird Deadline for the ASIST Conference Registration.

THEME

As our global information environment moves further into the twenty-first century, historic tensions continue to challenge us: the tensions between universal standards and local variations; between empirical and critical-discursive approaches; between an infrastructure that pushes us towards homogeneity and communities that insist on their specificity and individuals who insist upon their rights to privacy.

In particular, recent trends in the areas of both linked data and big data suggest that much of our information environment will be shaped by the need for an underlying infrastructure of classification that will enable us to combine data collected from different sources and for different purposes. Whatever the future holds for professional bibliographic control, crowdsourced indexing, big data algorithms or linked data ontologies, our future information environment will be shaped by harmonization: developing the means to reconcile diversity into a coherent structure than facilitates the development of information systems and information communities that do tangible good for their users.

With such a pressing need for harmonization, the time is ripe to revisit the great general classification schemes: the Dewey Decimal Classification, the Library of Congress Classification, and the Universal Decimal Classification. As instances of universal classificatory synthesis, these systems, in their rich history and active maintenance stand on the threshold of an intriguing, but as yet undefined future role in the twenty-first century. They could serve as exemplars and prototypes of future systems; they could be adapted into universal ontologies in their own right; they could exist in a dialogic and contrapuntal relationship with systems designed on different principles.

Topics appropriate to the workshop include, but are not limited to, the following:

Authors wishing to present a paper may submit a 500-word extended abstract. Extended abstracts should contain citations (not included in the word count). Presentations will be a maximum of 20 minutes long, followed by 10 minutes of discussion.